Our Christmas Guest: Watching
Advent is the Season of Waiting
Luke 21:25-36
Rev. Tim Callow
Preached Sun. November 28th, 2021
As we are just wrapping up the month of November I feel the need to speak prophetically into our nation’s perpetual Culture Wars. I don’t like to involve myself in the culture war lightly. I know that there are firmly held convictions from all camps, that we can get a little hot headed, and any intervention has to be carefully planned and from a pastoral heart. But I can’t help it, I must open my mouth. I can’t hold it in any longer. I need to speak out against the War on Advent.
I was in Meijer just a few days after Halloween, we hadn’t even gotten to Thanksgiving yet, and they were already putting the Christmas aisle together. I saw Christmas trees up a week after Halloween.
The Hallmark Channel started playing their Christmas movies before Halloween. They need to start that early because they have produced forty one movies for this year alone, not counting movies from previous years. Someone needs to remind Hallmark executives that there are twelve days of Christmas.
Every year Christmas music and Christmas specials start earlier and earlier. Every year we stray further and further from God’s light.
I am only half joking.
We have a strong desire to race to Christmas, and stores have a strong desire to make the Christmas shopping season last as long as possible. But if we move too quickly to Christmas, we will skip over Advent which is a beautiful season in its own right. In fact, it is perhaps my favorite season. I adore the lighting of candles, the pondering over the word, the hushed yearning and anxious anticipation.
Advent also has a deeper spiritual significance because Advent is the season of our age. Advent is a season about our waiting, our yearning, our standing at attention. It is the season where we prepare ourselves and our house to receive the Christ child. And we need to learn how to wait.
This morning Jesus counsels his disciples to wait for his return, to wait for his arrival, to wait for Christmas.
Jesus’ teaching comes toward the end of Luke’s Gospel, as he and his disciples are walking among the Temple in Jerusalem. His disciples had been marveling at the Temple and its stones, but Jesus warned them that the Temple was soon to be destroyed. This sparked a teaching on the end of the age, and the return of Jesus. In the passage we heard Jesus talks about what must take place before Christ returns. He uses imagery from throughout the Old Testament, imagery like signs in the sun and moon and stars, people fainting in fear, distress of nations. This imagery points to the undoing of the present order of things, the end of this present age before the birth of a new. When this happens we are not supposed to fear, but to take courage and raise our heads, because it is a sign that Christ is about to return, and our redemption, our vindication, is near.
In the meantime, we are told, “watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap.”
Jesus is coming, and he is coming soon. Though his coming is delayed from our perspective, he does not tarry, and he will surely return. We are to live each day expecting his arrival, prepared to receive the King.
When I know I’m about to have a guest, I immediately get to work. I clean the kitchen, I prepare the guest room, I sweep the floors, vacuum the carpet, I set my books back in their proper place (those books have an unfortunate tendency to migrate), I make sure we have ample food in the house, and all the while I look out my window waiting to see if the guest has yet to arrive, if I still have some more time. I’m sure you all know some of the hustle and bustle that goes on upon receiving a guest, perhaps you’ll be doing that soon as Christmas nears.
It is no different for the return of Jesus, our Christmas guest. We do not know when he will return. But we do know that he expects us to be ready. He expects a guest room to have been prepared, he expects ample provisions, and he expects us to be awake and alert.
The opposite of being awake, alert, and ready, is being “weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the cares of life.” The word here translated “dissipation” means, most literally, a hangover. Dissipation is the experience of having wasted ones time and resources, the pain of reckless living. Drunkenness is a momentary pleasure, but it leads to dissipation, and loss of memory, loss of control. A lack of sense. Lives of dissipation and drunkenness are lives of faithlessness. That is to say, lives that are determined by business as usual in the world’s terms, not in terms of faithful living as Jesus would have us live. The foolish rich man lived a life of dissipation when, having gained a tremendous harvest built two barns only to discover his life was required of him that night. The rich man, who ignored Lazarus at his gate lived a life of dissipation and drunkenness because he ignored Lazarus’ plight. But the Good Samaritan made right use of his resources, and of his time. Unlike the Priest and Levite, he was alert and aware, and cared for the man who was beside the road, made a place for him in his life. He, in other words, took the time to care for his Christmas guest.
This Advent we are called to prepare a place for Jesus, to make room for the one who was born in a manger. The first step in making room, in preparing a place for him, is alertness. Resolving not to live like business as usual, but to live knowing that at any moment Christ may call us, at any moment Christ may return to us, so living that we may not be caught drunk, that we may not be caught hungover, or despairing. We must be like the Martin the Cobbler in Leo Tolstoy’s famous short story Where Love is, God is. Martin was promised a divine visitation, and so he set up all day waiting for God to arrive. Instead he entertained a neighbor shoveling snow with warm food and the gospel, clothed a young woman stuck out in the cold, and resolved a dispute between a young man and an older woman. That night, he wondered why God had not visited him, only to discover that God had visited him in the neighbor, the woman, and the boy. We must be like Martin the Cobbler, that is fully prepared and ready to receive Jesus with joy however we may receive him.